I think the game is more ballanced to 18 man servers, or at least it's suposed to be for this build. Anything above 24 is pushing it. If you realy want to join a 32 man server, then it's realy just combat.On a side note, I remember someone had a 40 or so man server at one point.

I personally can't see 32 player servers being anything more than huge moshpits of endless combat devoid of interesting strategy across the map. The durability of alien lifeforms and structures just can't keep up with the amount of dakka a team of 16 marines can pull out of their bums for free. Nevermind the kind of box the server would have to have in order for performance to not drop like a rock if the game went past 20 minutes with the rampant structure spam.

Pretty much the only servers I've seen with those playercounts are ones running combat mod for the above reasons.

All of your opinions make superb reading. That being said, 32 players is fanastic, the mods make tweaks to accomplish greater balance, and a near 50/50 win ratio proves it. It really does make for a better game style which I and many people found preferable.

I didn't read one entry that went "well I played 32, and it sucked." If you had played, you'd be asking the same question as me.

Days later and all 3, 32 player servers are still ghost town. No one joins. There's something wrong with the browser, or how it connects, or something to make this happen.

Removed unnecessary insult. ~Jaqarll~ This game is horribly poorly optimized. Even on a super duper BEAST server machine, it is just TOO intensive a resource hog. Game simply was not designed for 32 players, and the entity count and tickrates get too high with that many players. Period. This results in laggy server performance issues. Even if you like the meat grinders, why on earth would you want to deal with that lag?

IMO 20 players is really the sweet spot for this game. Ours is a 20 slot server, and it costs us $2.50 a slot for a high end machine to run it optimally, and with virtually zero lag. There is still the occasional spike, but they are short and intermittent. With any luck, all 32 slot servers will go the way of the dinosaur, since the only thing they can really do, is give a bad rep to the games performance.

Days later and all 3, 32 player servers are still ghost town. No one joins. There's something wrong with the browser, or how it connects, or something to make this happen.

Have you tried seeding the server? If there's people wanting to play there, it shouldn't take more than 10-20 minutes for others to join up and start a small game.

I can only see one US 32 slot server right now though, so maybe you are right about this being some sort of error.

About larger player counts, I find that the game gets more and more stupid the further you get from like 8v8-9v9. My favorite server has 18 slots. Stupid can still be fun though, it's not like I never play on them :)